Invisible Bias

By Chris Berdik

Chris Berdik is a
freelance journalist in
Boston. This article
appeared in the Boston
Globe on December
19, 2004. Reprinted
with permission.

June 2005

A group of psychologists claim a test can measure
prejudices we harbor without even knowing it. Their
critics say they are politicizing psychology.

Inside the wood-paneled confines of the Harvard
Club, about 200 Bostonians gathered recently to
tap into their subconscious. Literally. Audience
members were told to move as quickly as possible
through a series of faces
and words projected on
a screen, tapping their
left knees for a young
face or a “good” word
(joy, sunshine, love),
and their right knees
for an old face or a
“bad” word (bomb,
agony, vomit). It took
about 15 seconds for
most to finish. But
when asked to switch,
to pair young faces
with “bad” words and
old faces with “good”
words, the rhythm
faltered and the tapping slowed. Audience members
shook their heads and giggled. Some threw up
their hands.

To the Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji,
who presided over the event, the demonstration
showed that most of the audience—like most of the
people who have been subjects in this type of
experiment—have a harder time associating old people
(or nonwhite people, or homosexuals) with “good”
when given no time to think. These are all examples
of what Banaji calls implicit prejudice, and their
importance extends way beyond an intellectual parlor
game. Implicit prejudice, she argues, can affect our
decisions and behaviors without our even knowing
it, undermining our conscious ideas and best intentions
about equality and justice.

Such implicit prejudices are “ordinary,” says
Banaji. “Ordinary people show them. They stem
from ordinary cognitive processes.”

About a decade ago, Banaji and Anthony
Greenwald, a psychologist at the University of
Washington, developed a test for uncovering these
subconscious preferences—the Implicit Association
Test (IAT). Normally, instead of tapping knees, an
IAT subject uses a computer keyboard to group “good”
and “bad” words with images as split-second differences
in response times are measured and tabulated.

Today, some 8,000 people a week take an IAT on
the website of Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.
edu/implicit/), founded in 1998 by Banaji, Greenwald,
and Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist.
The site has dozens of tests measuring implicit biases
on everything from politics to race to gender roles.
Some results so far: 75 percent of white respondents
implicitly favor white over black, more than 70 percent
of all respondents favor straight people over gay
people, and about 80 percent favor young over old.

To Banaji and a growing number of researchers,
the IAT has potential uses far beyond the lab. This
year, Banaji is heading a group of psychologists and
legal scholars at the Radcliffe Institute to develop new
approaches to anti-discrimination law based on the
idea of implicit prejudice. The IAT has been proposed
for use in corporate ethics classes, police and other
professional training, and in consumer research.

But not everybody trusts the IAT. Social psychologists
are divided on just what the IAT measures, arguing
that different response times may just reflect an
awareness of cultural stereotypes and social inequality.
In February, the journal Psychological Inquiry will
devote an entire issue to the debate surrounding the
test. And beyond the technicalities, a bigger question
looms: If prejudice really is rooted deeply in our
subconscious minds, how can we get rid of it?

The foundation for a social scientific study of
prejudice was laid 50 years ago by a Harvard
psychologist named Gordon W. Allport in “The
Nature of Prejudice.” Prejudice, Allport wrote, grew
from the instinctive way people simplify their world
by categorizing everything—including other people.

According to Allport, we have various automatic
expectations based on probabilities. We assume, for
instance, that a man in a three-piece suit has money
and employment or that the person sitting beside us
in church shares our basic beliefs. Allport noted that
while such expectations aren’t always correct,
they’re useful and generally harmless. For Allport,
prejudice—the dangerous phenomenon that could
lead to everything from racial slurs to lynchings—
began when those expectations were accompanied
by conscious antipathy toward a particular group and
were inflexible in the face of contradictory evidence.

Allport’s treatise remained a foundation for
psychological research into prejudice for decades.
Indeed, Banaji and her colleagues begin with the
premise that prejudice has its roots in the normal
human tendency to categorize. But they veer sharply
from a fundamental tenet of Allport’s theory. In their
view, you don’t need to have antipathy toward any
particular group to harbor implicit prejudices that
could lead to discriminatory behavior. Instead,
according to IAT researchers, implicit prejudices
build over time as stereotyped images seep into our
brain—news images of the African-American suspect
or the Arab terrorist, commercials where wives clean
the house, the not-so-bright sitcom character with a
Southern drawl.

Says Banaji, “Seeing is believing, at least at some
level.”

A big reason for the persistence of these
prejudices, she emphasizes, is denial. People with
strong egalitarian values know there are prejudiced
people out there who act in prejudiced ways, but
they don’t allow that they might be one of them.
Banaji argues that this denial is rooted in the desire
to believe that our judgments and actions are all
within our conscious control.

IAT co-creator Greenwald agrees: “There are
many, many well-meaning people who attend diversity
trainings and say, ‘I’m happy to go along with this,
but it’s not my problem.’ But with the IAT, people
discover, ‘Well, there’s something going on in my
head, too.”

That’s why Banaji and her colleagues at the
Radcliffe Institute think it’s problematic that much
anti-discrimination law requires plaintiffs to prove an
employer or other individual intended to discriminate.
They hope to spread the idea of implicit, unintentional
prejudice throughout the criminal justice system.
And they hope to develop legal arguments, bolstered
by theories of implicit prejudice, that could prove in
court that an employer’s hiring and promotion policies
discriminate against women or minorities, for example,
even without any conscious intent.

While Banaji says many subjects react negatively
to being told they exhibit implicit prejudices, those at
the Harvard Club who cared to comment after the
presentation seemed convinced. “I think everybody
has biases. It’s part of being human,” said va Das, 62,
a civil rights lawyer. “I think the only real question is
what to do about them.” Bob Frankel, a 59-year-old
research engineer at MIT added, “I think one of the
values of people taking tests like [the IAT] is so they
realize, ‘OK, maybe I’m not quite who I thought I
was.” But not everyone thinks Banaji and her
colleagues have necessarily discovered a hidden
reservoir of prejudice. The dissenters, a number of
whom have articles in the upcoming issue of
Psychological Inquiry, argue that a speedier association
of white with good and black with bad may simply
reflect a subject’s awareness of societal inequalities,
such as the disproportionate number of blacks in
prison, rather than a subconscious bias.

The principal critique of the implicit prejudice
theory, written by Hal Arkes of Ohio State and Philip
Tetlock of Berkeley, carries the subtitle “Would Jesse
Jackson ‘Fail’ the Implicit Association Test?” In one
section, they speculate whether Jesse Jackson and
Jesse Helms would score similarly on the IAT.

“Although the two figures disagree profoundly
on certain political issues,” the authors note. “They
agree that the ‘African-American family’ is in trouble,
that African-American crime rates are far too high,
and that African-American test scores are too low.
Should we theoretically expect indices of ‘negative
affectivity’ [such as the IAT] to differentiate people
who share a considerable knowledge base but who
differ only in their causal attributions for betweengroup
inequality?”

Instead, Arkes and Tetlock argue that to
conclude a person is prejudiced, one should stick
with the Allport standard, which says that prejudice
requires some level of hostility toward a particular
group. What’s more, they say, Banaji and other IAT
promoters are “politicizing” psychology. “We suspect
that, when the history of social psychology is written
at the end of the 21st century,” they write, “implicit
prejudice research will be a prime exhibit of how
society became so obsessed with avoiding stereotypes
that it skewered citizens as racists for displaying even
trace awareness of politically painful realities.”

But Banaji dismisses the argument that the test
simply reflects “awareness” of stereotypes and
inequalities. She brings up a recent “meta-analysis”
of more than 60 studies that show the IAT to be a
better predictor of behavior than explicit measures of
attitude in sensitive areas such as racial interaction.
Among white subjects, for example, a strong
subconscious bias for whites over blacks among
white subjects was correlated with behaviors such as
lack of eye contact with a black test administrator.
Other IAT lab experiments found implicit prejudices
correlated to more negative ratings of a black author’s
essay and a greater willingness to make hypothetical
cuts in the budgets of minority student groups.

“If it’s just an activation in my head, if it’s not my
attitude, then it shouldn’t affect my behavior,” says
Banaji. “We would all agree that this is something that
comes from the culture. But I would say it becomes us.”

Banaji recently bought some postcards featuring
prominent people of color: Jackie Robinson, Zora
Neale Hurston, Ghandi. She scanned them into her
office computer, and they now cycle through as
screen savers. It’s part of the ongoing effort of this
Indian-born psychologist to rid herself of her own
pro-white IAT bias. “[My race bias] troubles me
perhaps more than any other one,” she told the
audience at the Harvard Club. “I try to beat that test
all the time.” Banaji also admits to other implicit
biases, such as associating men more strongly with
careers and women with the home.

Indeed, Banaji and fellow IAT researchers are
investigating ways of mitigating the biases their tests
uncover. Some methods are more passive, such as
altering the environment where we live and work to
increase exposure to images and situations that
contradict prevalent stereotypes. Experiments reveal,
for instance, that having an African-American
administer the test to subjects lessened their
pro-white bias, as did having a subject view images of
admired African Americans just before taking the
test. (In fact, black IAT subjects are split almost evenly
between favoring black and favoring white.)

But the researchers believe the remedy can’t just
be passive. “Just as we need to do work with the physical body, I think mental muscles need the same
kind of treatment,” says Banaji.

At least one member of the Harvard Club
audience seems to have taken this advice to heart. After
Banaji’s lecture Sarah Smith considered “the necessity
of meditating on people who are not like me…to
stretch my sense of who I’m in the same human boat
with, as it were.” As an example, the 56-year-old writer
from Brookline quipped, “I now try thinking kind
thoughts about Republicans on a regular basis.”

Writing on the cusp of the civil rights movement,
Allport noted, “It required years of labor and billions
of dollars to gain the secret of the atom. It will take
a still greater investment to gain the secrets of man’s
irrational nature. It is easier, someone has said, to
smash an atom than a prejudice.”

In the decades since, much overt or sanctioned
discrimination has been eliminated from American
society. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of
1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. But the
scholars who debate the IAT give this progress
different spins. In Psychological Inquiry, Arkes and
Tetlock write that it’s disconcerting that “cognitive
research programs now attempt to gauge prejudice
not by what people do, or by what people say, but
rather by milliseconds of response facilitation or
inhibition in implicit-association paradigms.” In
another paper they ask, “How far down the continuum
should we venture in pursuit of ever-sneakier forms
of racism?”

On the other side, IAT researchers point to the
concern many feel about the persistence of social
inequalities. Minority populations continue to have
higher rates of poverty and unemployment than do
white populations. A racial “achievement gap” persists
in education. Women still earn only about 80 cents
for every dollar earned by men.

“It’s difficult to be optimistic given that all that
well-meaning activity of the second half of the 20th
century hasn’t been able to rid us of these disparities,”
says Greenwald. He adds, “I think if we can use the
IAT to spur a new look at human attitudes and
stereotypes, then we can begin to develop a new
model of the person and educate people about it.
And I think this is the basis of some optimism.”

Banaji insists that these efforts should be more
about awareness than about guilt. “My job is not to
construct ethical theories or define the ultimate
good,” she says. “We’re interested in revealing to
people that their own moral and ethical standards are
being compromised by the stuff in their heads.”